The Second Stakeout, Higher Stakes

After the failure of the first stakeout, Poppy and I took a week off — not because I'd come to my senses, but because Poppy insisted on a "professional reputation recovery period," during which, under her terms, I was permitted to mention Nigel no more than once a day, a condition I found nearly impossible to meet.

The promised weekend pint did, in fact, happen — a surprisingly warm, pleasant evening at the Duck and Compass, during which Nigel was almost exactly the man I remembered from before all this began: telling stories about ridiculous insurance clients, delivering jokes with that trademark deadpan that only lands the next morning, never once checking his phone or receiving a single suspicious call. I nearly — nearly — let myself believe, for one evening, that this was all just the product of my excessively observant mind.

Nearly. Because the very next day, on the Monday, fresh mud appeared on his doormat again, and on Wednesday the bin on the landing held another burner-phone box — the fourth, if we're keeping an exhaustive count, which, of course, I was.

"Right," Poppy said when I showed her the photo of the box over lunch. "Fine, the reputation-recovery period is officially over. What next?"

"Next," I said, with a resolve that, looking back, was fuelled rather more by excitement than good sense, "we do exactly the same thing, only better. Dark clothes, no bright colours. More distance. And this time — a backup plan, in case he vanishes into another alley."

"My backup plan is going home," Poppy said, though from the look in her eyes she was already mentally swapping out that unfortunate yellow coat for something less conspicuous.

The second stakeout began on Wednesday evening, and, I have to say, went considerably more professionally than the first: we kept a decent distance, took no photographs of anyone's head, and, crucially, didn't set foot anywhere near a funeral parlour, which I consider a personal achievement given the circumstances.

This time Nigel didn't take the bus — he walked, with the same confident, brisk stride that led us through a string of streets growing progressively darker and quieter, further and further from the main roads, until we found ourselves somewhere I privately dubbed "the part of London even tourists don't stumble into by accident."

He stopped in an alley behind a closed pub — an old building with a peeling sign reading "The Jolly Milkman" — and, after a few minutes' wait, during which Poppy and I hid behind a stack of wooden pallets with a sense of our own cleverness that, in hindsight, looks fairly naive, he was joined by a figure in a dark coat whom I initially took for yet another underworld accomplice.

The figure held out a small package to Nigel — solid, judging by the way it sat in her hand, a thick envelope or folder — which he quickly tucked into his coat's inner pocket, and the two of them exchanged a few words we couldn't make out from our distance, but which, from their body language, sounded serious and businesslike.

"That's her," I whispered, nudging Poppy with my elbow. "The handoff. Straight out of a film."

"Or it's his girlfriend," Poppy whispered back, "whom he doesn't want to introduce to the neighbours because he's worried they'll start following her around too."

"In a dark alley behind a closed pub? At eight in the evening, with an envelope?"

"Some people are romantic in specific ways, Dave."

The figure in the dark coat turned to leave, and for a second her face caught the streetlight — a woman, around thirty, with a sharp, intelligent face, the sort of face that belongs to someone used to asking questions rather than answering them — before she vanished back into the alley's shadows, heading the opposite way from us.

"Fine," Poppy whispered, with considerably less scepticism in her voice now, "I'll grant you that wasn't a date."

We waited a few more minutes after Nigel left in the other direction, before daring to step out from behind the pallets — and it was at that exact moment, with the kind of irony fate seems to reserve specifically for peaks of overconfidence, that two figures in security-firm uniforms stepped out of the shadows by the alley entrance, one of them holding a torch trained directly at us.

"Evening," one of them said, in a tone that promised nothing good. "Care to explain what you're doing hiding behind pallets round the back of a closed premises at nine in the evening?"

I opened my mouth to say something convincing, and discovered that in all my weeks of preparing for possible complications, I had never once come up with anything remotely plausible for this exact scenario, and what came out, in the end, was the only thing that surfaced in that moment of panic:

"We're looking for a cat."

Poppy put her face in her hands.

But before we get to the rest of this frankly humiliating scene — and believe me, it gets more humiliating — it's worth backing up slightly to what happened just before the guards showed up, because those few minutes turned out, as I only understood much later, to be the most important of the entire evening, even though at the time I didn't give them nearly the weight they deserved.

While we'd been waiting behind the pallets, I'd managed — this time with the help of a pair of binoculars Poppy, to my genuine surprise, produced from her bag with the words "I came prepared too, just without the dramatics" — to get a good enough look at the woman in the dark coat's face to note a distinguishing feature: a small scar above her left eyebrow, and a habit of constantly adjusting the shoulder bag she carried, as though she never quite trusted it to stay put.

"Write that down," I whispered to Poppy, getting my phone out to record the details while they were still fresh. "Distinguishing features. Might come in useful."

"Dave, we're not the police. We're not building a profile on a woman who was simply talking to your neighbour in an alley."

"Just in case."

"In case of what?"

The question hung there, unanswered, because I couldn't, if I'm honest, have told you myself what exact scenario might require a detailed profile of an unknown woman with a scar above her eyebrow — but I noted the details all the same, because by this point in the story, noting details had become something like a nervous tic I couldn't quite shake, even recognising how excessive it was.

The conversation between Nigel and the woman lasted no more than three minutes, but it carried the specific weight of body language that unmistakably distinguishes a business meeting from a chance encounter. She nodded several times, laughed once, briefly — a short, involuntary laugh that seemed to escape past her professional reserve — and, at the end, touched Nigel's shoulder in a gesture that, I admit, briefly sparked an entirely new theory in me, one Poppy, the moment I whispered it to her, immediately and firmly shot down.

"That's not romance, Dave. That's a handshake with a friendly edge. People say goodbye to colleagues like that, not lovers."

"How can you tell the difference from twenty metres away in the dark?"

"Professional experience watching your own disastrous dates," she shot back, and I decided to let the subject drop, partly out of wounded pride, and partly because it was exactly at that moment that the beam of a torch fell across our backs, marking the start of the conversation about a missing grey cat.